Poem of the Day: William Butler Yeats

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, 
And nodding by the fire, take down this book, 
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look 
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; 

How many loved your moments of glad grace, 
And loved your beauty with love false or true; 
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, 
And loved the sorrows of your changing face. 

And bending down beside the glowing bars 
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled 
And paced upon the mountains overhead 
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. 

--William Butler Yeats

The last time I did a Yeats poem, I maybe overstressed the virtues of the late poetry, so here's one from when he was not yet 30. The diction is simpler, and there's no politics, Irish mythology, or cosmological gyres at work, but the mastery of language is as breathtaking as it would ever get. And even here the preoccupation with aging that runs through the late poems is anticipated. 

Poems of the Day: Robert Herrick

The Night Piece, to Julia 

Her eyes the glowworm lend thee; 
The shooting stars attend thee; 
     And the elves also, 
     Whose little eyes glow 
Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee. 

No will-o'-the-wisp mislight thee; 
Nor snake or slowworm bite thee; 
     But on, on thy way, 
     Not making a stay, 
Since ghost there's none to affright thee. 

Let not the dark thee cumber; 
What though the moon does slumber? 
     The stars of the night 
     Will lend thee their light, 
Like tapers clear without number. 

Then, Julia, let me woo thee, 
Thus, thus to come unto me; 
     And when I shall meet 
     Thy silvery feet, 
My soul I'll pour into thee. 

Upon Julia's Clothes 

Whenas in silks my Julia goes, 
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows 
That liquefaction of her clothes. 
Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see 
That brave vibration, each way free, 
O, how that glittering taketh me! 

--Robert Herrick

Are there more accomplished love poems in English than Herrick's? Has anyone better evoked the sound and feel of silk? Has anyone better skirted the boundaries of explicitness? (Of course, I have to recall the experience of a friend who assigned her class "Upon Julia's Clothes" and got this paraphrase: "When Herrick sees Julia wearing silk, he has a liquefaction in his clothes.") I picked two poems today because I couldn't choose which one I liked more.

Poem of the Day: A.E. Housman

     "Terence, this is stupid stuff: 
You eat your victuals fast enough; 
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear, 
To see the rate you drink your beer, 
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make, 
It gives a chap the belly-ache. 
The cow, the old cow, she is dead; 
It sleeps well, the horned head: 
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now 
To hear such tunes as killed the cow. 
Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time 
Moping melancholy mad: 
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad." 

     Why, if 'tis dancing you would be, 
There's brisker pipes than poetry. 
Say, for what were hop-yards meant, 
Or why was Burton built on Trent? 
Oh many a peer of England brews 
Livelier liquor than the Muse, 
And malt does more than Milton can 
To justify God's ways to man. 
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink 
For fellows whom it hurts to think: 
Look into the pewter pot 
To see the world as the world's not. 
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past: 
The mischief is that 'twill not last. 
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair 
And left my necktie God knows where, 
And carried half-way home, or near, 
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer: 
Then the world seemed none so bad, 
And I myself a sterling lad; 
And down in lovely muck I've lain, 
Happy till I woke again. 
Then I saw the morning sky: 
Heighho, the tale was all a lie; 
The world, it was the old world yet, 
I was I, my things were wet, 
And nothing now remained to do 
But begin the game anew. 

     Therefore, since the world has still 
Much good, but much less good than ill, 
And while the sun and moon endure 
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure, 
I'd face it as a wise man would, 
And train for ill and not for good. 
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale 
Is not so brisk a brew as ale: 
Out of a stem that scored the hand 
I wrung it in a weary land. 
But take it: if the smack is sour, 
The better for the embittered hour; 
It should do good to heart and head 
When your soul is in my soul's stead; 
And I will friend you, if I may, 
In the dark and cloudy day.

     There was a king reigned in the East: 
There, when kinds will sit to feast, 
They get their fill before they think 
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink. 
He gathered all the springs to birth 
From the many-venomed earth; 
First a little, thence to more, 
He sampled all her killing store; 
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound, 
Sate the king when healths went round. 
They put arsenic in his meat 
And stared aghast to watch him eat; 
They poured strychnine in his cup 
And shook to see him drink it up: 
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt: 
Them it was their poison hurt. 
--I tell the tale that I heard told. 
Mithridates, he died old.

--A.E. Housman

Housman is one of those poets that people outgrow -- and then maybe grow back into. It's true that there are a few too many Housman poems with speakers moping about turning 20 or 21 or 22, about athletes dying young, about the passing away of rose-lipt maidens and lightfoot lads. He seems to be the poet of post-adolescent sentimental Weltschmerz. But there comes a time in life when one maybe likes to recall one's own post-adolescent sentimental Weltschmerz, and then only Housman will do. 

The response of "Terence" (A Shropshire Lad was originally titled The Poems of Terence Hearsay until the publisher wisely talked him out of it) to his friend's critique is a kind of poetic manifesto, a defense of melancholy that contains three or four of Housman's most memorable lines. The trouble is, one likely remembers "malt does more than Milton can" more than one remembers the moral of the Mithridates anecdote: a little poison (i.e., poetic truth) every day keeps the undertaker away. 

Poem of the Day: John Donne

From Holy Sonnets 

14 

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You 
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; 
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me,'and bend 
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. 
I, like an usurped town, to'another due, 
Labor to'admit You, but O, to no end; 
Reason, Your viceroy'in me, me should defend, 
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. 
Yet dearly'I love You,'and would be lovéd fain, 
But am betrothed unto Your enemy. 
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again; 
Take me to You, imprison me, for I, 
Except You'enthrall me, never shall be free, 
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me. 

--John Donne 

When I posted yesterday's poem, it put me in mind of this one. Not just because of the powerfully emotional religious content (it is as much a "terrible sonnet" as Hopkins's is a "Holy Sonnet"), but because Donne's experiments with verse anticipate those of Hopkins by 250 years or so. The marks ['] that indicate the linkage of one vowel sound to another, to keep the pentameter line, for example: 

Yet dear | ly'I love | You,'and would | be lov | éd fain  

And the harshness of the diction: 

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend

These are verbal tactics that shocked the poets of the eighteenth century, and which we don't see again until Blake and, later, Browning. Yet Donne is as much a master of innovation as Hopkins, and perhaps as much an inimitable poet. Of course, what makes this uniquely Donne is the mingling of sexual violence -- of rape, in a word -- with religious imagery. Hopkins flirted with such things but, perhaps because of his own sexual insecurity, never used them with such raw power as Donne.  

Poem of the Day: Gerard Manley Hopkins

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, 
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. 
Comforter, where, where is your comforting? 
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? 
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief  
Woe, world-sorrow, on an age-old anvil wince and sing -- 
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked "No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."

    O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall 
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap 
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small 
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, 
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all 
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. 

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

As I said before about Hopkins: "Even if you don't believe what he's saying (I don't), you believe that he believed it." But here I believe what he's saying in the sense that I believe he underwent deep personal torment, call it spiritual or call it psychological. His solution -- becoming a Jesuit priest -- is not one I'd prescribe, especially to a man struggling to repress his homosexual desires, and was also not one that seemed to alleviate his emotional suffering. Nowhere in his verse is that suffering more powerfully expressed than in this, one of his "terrible sonnets." (The first word ought to be amended to "terrifying" or "terrified" -- they are both.) And nowhere is it clearer that his faith, however earnestly and tenaciously he clung to it, failed to give him comfort for very long.

Poem of the Day: William Shakespeare

When that I was and a little tiny boy, 
     With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, 
A foolish thing was but a toy, 
     For the rain it raineth every day. 

But when I came to man's estate, 
     With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, 
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate, 
     For the rain it raineth every day. 

But when I came alas! to wive, 
     With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, 
By swaggering could I never thrive, 
     For the rain it raineth every day. 

But when I came unto my beds, 
     With hey, ho, the wind and the rainn, 
With toss-pots still had drunken heads, 
     For the rain it raineth every day. 

A great while ago the world begun, 
     With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, 
But that's all one, our play is done, 
     And we'll strive to please you every day. 

--William Shakespeare

It's just a little lyric, casually tossed off, I suspect, and maybe just tacked on to the end of Twelfth Night to give the cast something to dance to. It doesn't even make a whole lot of sense if you're trying to follow the logic of the verses. But on the other hand it's perfect, the only fitting coda to this great melancholy comedy. 

In the 1996 Tevor Nunn film of the play, the clown, Feste, is played by, of all people, Ben Kingsley -- not the most antic of actors. But then Feste is the soberest and wisest of Shakespeare's clowns. 



This is Trevor Peacock's Feste from a 1980 BBC TV version: 



And last, but ... well, least: Tommy Steele's Feste from a 1969 BBC version. This clip includes a bit of Alec Guinness's Malvolio, but not Ralph Richardson's Sir Toby Belch. The whole thing is on YouTube.

Poem of the Day: Thomas Hardy

The Darkling Thrush 

I leant upon a coppice gate 
     When Frost was spectre-gray, 
And Winter's dregs made desolate 
     The weakening eye of day. 
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky 
     Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh 
     Had sought their household fires. 

The land's sharp features seemed to be 
     The Century's corpse outleant, 
His crypt the cloudy canopy, 
     The wind his death-lament. 
The ancient pulse of germ and birth 
     Was shrunken hard and dry, 
And every spirit upon earth 
     Seemed fervorless as I. 

At once a voice arose among 
     The bleak twigs overhead 
In a full-hearted evensong 
     Of joy illimited; 
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, 
     In blast-beruffled plume, 
Had chosen thus to fling his soul 
     Upon the growing gloom. 

So little cause for carolings 
     Of such ecstatic sound 
Was written on terrestrial things 
     Afar or nigh around, 
That I could think there trembled through 
     His happy good-night air 
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew 
     And I was unaware. 

--Thomas Hardy 

In general, I prefer Hardy the poet to Hardy the novelist. In his fiction, he's so eager to prove that the Universe has it in for Humankind that he stacks the deck. Thus, Tess goes to her doom because of a letter that slips under the carpet when it's slid under the door. But at least in "The Darkling Thrush" there's some cold comfort: a bird's song arousing Hope. 

Of course, old Hardy knows that things are going to remain "desolate," "weakening" and "fervorless." The poem, famously, was published in the Times of London on January 1, 1901, the first day of a new century, and was originally given the perhaps more Hardyesque title "By the Century's Deathbed." Given that the century a-borning would see two World Wars and all manner of atrocity besides, that hopeful thrush turned out to be a birdbrain.

Poem of the Day: Philip Sidney

Strephon:
Ye goatherd gods, that love the grassy mountains, 
Ye nymphs which haunt the springs in pleasant valleys, 
Ye satyrs joyed with free and quiet forests, 
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music, 
Which to my woes gives still an early morning, 
And draws the dolor on till weary evening. 

Klaius: 
O Mercury, foregoer to the evening, 
O heavenly huntress of the savage mountains, 
O lovely star, entitled of the morning, 
While that my voice doth fill these woeful valleys, 
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music, 
Which oft hath Echo tired in secret forests. 

Strephon: 
I, that once was free burgess of the forests, 
Where shade from sun, and sport I sought in evening, 
I, that was once esteemed for pleasant music, 
Am banished now among the monstrous mountains 
Of huge despire, and foul affliction's valleys, 
Am grown a screech owl to myself each morning. 

Klaius: 
I, that was once delighted every morning, 
Hunting the wild inhabiters of forests, 
I, that was once the music of these valleys, 
So darkened am that all my day is evening, 
Heartbroken so, that molehills seem high mountains 
And fill the vales with cries instead of music. 

Strephon: 
Long since, alas, my deadly swannish music 
Hath made itself a crier of the morning, 
And hath with wailing strength climbed highest mountains; 
Long since my thoughts more desert be than forests, 
Long since I see my joys come to their evening, 
And state thrown down to overtrodden valleys. 

Klaius: 
Long since the happy dwellers of these valleys 
Have prayed me leave my strange exclaiming music, 
Which troubles their day's work and joys of evening; 
Long since I hate the night, more hate the morning; 
Long since my thoughts chase me like beasts in forests 
And make me wish myself laid under mountains. 

Strephon: 
Meseems I see the high and stately mountains 
Transform themselves to low dejected valleyus; 
Meseems I hear in these ill-changéd forests 
The nightingales to learn of owls their music; 
Meseems I feel the comfort of the morning 
Turned to the mortal serene of an evening. 

Klaius: 
Meseems I see a filthy cloudy evening 
As soon as sun begins to climb the mountains; 
Meseems I feel a noisome scent, the morning 
When I do smell the flowers of these valleys; 
Meseems I hear, when I do hear sweet music, 
The dreadful cries of murdered men in forests. 

Strephon: 
I wish to fire the trees of all these forests; 
I give the sun a last farewell each evening; 
I curse the fiddling finders-out of music; 
With envy I do hate the lofty mountains 
And with despite despise the humble valleys; 
I do detest night, evening, day, and morning. 

Klaius:  
Curse to myself my prayer is, the morning; 
My fire is more than can be made with forests, 
My state more base than are the basest valleys. 
I wish no evenings more to see, each evening; 
Shaméd, I hate myself in sight of mountains 
And stop mine ears, lest I grow mad with music. 

Strephon: 
For she whose parts maintained a perfect music, 
Whose beauties shined more than the blushing morning, 
Who much did pass in state the stately mountains, 
In straightness passed the cedars of the forests, 
Hath cast me, wretch, into eternal evening 
By taking her two suns from these dark valleys. 

Klaius: 
For she, with whom compared, the Alps are valleys, 
She, whose least word brings from the spheres their music, 
At whose approach the sun rose in the evening, 
Who where she went bare in her forehead morning, 
Is gone, is gone, from these our spoiléd forests, 
Turning to deserts our best pastured mountains. 

Strephon and Klaius:
These mountains witness shall, so shall these valleys, 
These forests eke, made wretched by our music, 
Our morning hymn this is, and song at evening. 

--Philip Sidney 

When I count my blessings, one of them ought to be that I'll never have to read Sidney's Arcadia again, as once I did in grad school. Let's just say that Elizabethan pastoral romance is not my thing. But square in the midst of it comes this gorgeous double sestina, with its hypnotic repetition of the end-words mountains, valleys, forests, music, morning, evening, in kaleidoscopic rotation. I guess I'm a sucker for fixed verse forms. They're a little like word puzzles to me. But Sidney manages to make this one as beautiful as it is clever.                        

  

Poem of the Day: Emily Dickinson

Tell the Truth but tell it slant -- 
Success in Circuit lies 
Too bright for our infirm Delight 
The Truth's superb surprise 
As Lightning to the Children eased 
With explanation kind 
The Truth must dazzle gradually 
Or every man be blind --

--Emily Dickinson

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple," as Oscar Wilde observed, and as anyone who has ever given a deposition or served as a witness or on a jury is likely to agree. But I think this is also a case of Emily Dickinson anticipating Paul Verlaine, who proclaimed (remember?) in "Art Poétique": Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point / Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise (You must never set out to choose your words without some imprecision). Maybe that's why so many people dislike poetry: If it's any good, it never takes the easy way. I won't go so far as Plato to call poets liars, but maybe this puts a different spin on Shelley's claim that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. We know how everybody feels about legislators and their tenuous connection to the truth these days. Still, maybe the real explication of Dickinson's lyric belongs to Jack Nicholson:

Poem of the Day: Thomas Wyatt

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek, 
With naked foot stalking in my chamber. 
I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek, 
That now are wild, and do not remember 
That sometime they put themselves in danger 
To take bread at my hand; and now they range, 
Busily seeking with a continual change. 

Thanked be Fortune it hath been otherwise, 
Twenty times better; but once in special, 
In thin array, after a pleasant guise, 
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, 
And she me caught in her arms long and small, 
And therewith all sweetly did me kiss 
And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?" 
It was no dream, I lay broad waking. 
But all is turned, thorough my gentleness, 
Into a strange fashion of forsaking; 
And I have leave to go, of her goodness, 
And she also to use newfangleness. 
But since that I so kindely am served, 
I fain would know what she hath deserved. 

--Thomas Wyatt

A paranoid love poem, just what you'd expect from someone in Henry VIII's court. I'll leave it to the scholars to determine whether the poem is about Anne Boleyn, with whom Wyatt is supposed to have had an affair. The thing I like about this poem is the blend of sex and danger, along with the bittersweet note of self-reproach.